


Carpe Diem

by knightship



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Animus, Assassin's Creed AU, Bleeding Effect, M/M, derek and stiles are assassins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-07
Updated: 2013-02-07
Packaged: 2017-11-28 11:38:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/673973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knightship/pseuds/knightship
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles remembers taking the Creed over hundreds of lives, sometimes all at once.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Carpe Diem

Stiles is woken in the middle of the night by the sound of low voices and shifting metal. For a moment he thinks it’s time to get up and get to work, but that’s not right- Deaton hasn’t lit the candles, and the sky is still ink-black, not the grey-black he’s risen with for the past two years.

He creeps downstairs in bare feet, and there’s a single candle lit in Deaton’s shop, and a man built like a bear, dressed in a white coat with a hood talking to his master. When he presses the door open with cautious fingertips, it creaks, and the man whirls, a blade flashing. 

Before he can scream, Deaton’s pinned him to the wall and clapped a hand over his mouth.

“Stiles,” he says, overly calm for such a tense situation, “this is Derek Hale. He’s a friend. You won’t scream?”

He shakes his head, eyes bulging, and Deaton lets him go.

“Some friend!” he hisses, elbowing Deaton away so he can push off the wall. “Good, _sane_ friends don’t come calling in the middle of the night bearing knives!”

Derek Hale, or whoever he really is, says nothing, only flicks his wrist so that the metal disappears up his sleeve. 

“Your apprentice, Deaton? He won’t speak of me,” he growls, not a question.

“No, he won’t, if he knows what’s good for him,” Deaton says, smiling warmly. The threat clings to Stiles skin as he moves closer, to where the press is being set up.

“What’re you doing?” he asks, shivering a little as he inspects the backwards letters being set. Derek makes an angry noise and moves like he’s going to bat him away, but Deaton sets a hand on his arm.

“Stiles can help. It’ll go much faster without you in the way,” he says, charmingly shoving Derek into a chair to wait. Stiles sighs, rolling up the sleeves to his nightshirt. It’s a good thing he fell asleep in his breeches, or else he’d be freezing right now.

“I suppose if you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound,” he mutters to himself, and takes Deaton’s directions sleepily but well.

When the first page slips out of the press, he takes it up to read as he blows on the ink, squinting in the candlelight. 

Then he laughs. Loudly, despite the way Deaton and Derek both look like they want to murder him for it.

“Do you want to bring the Loyalists down on our heads?” Derek hisses. Under his dark hood, he’s got the the face of a young man, not much older than Stiles, and green eyes.

“This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever read! “Hero of the Patriots”? “The People’s Man”? Are you serious?”

Derek goes still, and Deaton takes the smudged print from his hands. 

“If you had listened, I would have been able to proof this before we got it in the press,” he says mildly, and Derek snarls, snatching up the paper and crumbling it.

“Fine. I’ll pay for another printing, just be quick about it,” he snaps, and Stiles takes up a quill to jot down ideas.

“What’re you running from, exactly?” he asks, scrawling phrases that sound snappy but _reasonable_ on his paper. He can feel Derek looking over his shoulder, but ignores it.

“You let your apprentice write your pamphlets for you?”

“Stiles has a better head for propaganda than I do,” Deaton says, resetting the letters of the press. 

“It’s like advertising, only with an idea,” Stiles chirps. He jots down a few more things, then turns to Derek, who’s much closer than he thought.

“Here, pick some of these and I can flesh something out.”

They work until dawn, and when they’ve got a stack of pamphlets, Derek folds them into one arm and sets a purse on the table.

It’s big, and it’s heavy. 

“For the trouble,” he says, and disappears out the door.

“Well that was weird,” Stiles says, and Deaton snorts.

Derek keeps coming back after that to get propaganda printed that makes the townsfolk of Boston less likely to point at him and scream “Murderer!” Some of them even subtly point him in the direction of a hiding place when the lobsterbacks are on his trail, and more than once Stiles lets him in so he can duck into Stiles’ room while redcoats run past, stopping to ask him if he’s seen anything. He always says no, even though it’d be easy to give Derek up.

Stiles isn’t stupid. He’s heard how people talk about the man in the white hood, how he’s saved people from soldiers, provided refuge, and fights for freedom. He’s not sure what to make of it, or how Scott crows about how he met the assassin once, how he was gruff and heroic.

Derek happens to be an ass, but he’s got his moments. Like when he scatters coins in the street, discrete as can be, but he smiles when the orphans can scoop them from underfoot without fighting. And Lord, does the man never miss an opportunity to pet a dog or drop feed for a turkey or a chicken. It’s like he’s trying to make up for all the people he’s killed by being kind to animals or something. 

Stiles almost doesn’t realize they’ve become friends until it’s once again a moonless night, and Derek takes the opportunity to sneak into his bedroom window dripping blood.

“Jesus!” he curses, once he’s woken enough to realize there’s someone in his room. He curses again when he realizes it’s Derek, and then again with much more vehemence when he realizes the slick stain he’s stepped in is blood.

Derek falls into his single chair with a pained hiss, clutching his side. Stiles goes to the washbasin and breaks the ice there, wetting a rag. When he bends to light the candle, though, Derek snatches up his wrist and tugs him so close that the light seems to come from his eyes, eyes that aren’t just green, they’re blue and grey and brown and light all at once.

“ _Wake up, Stiles. The- bleeeding- ke up!_ ”

“I know you’re bleeding, I’m trying to fix it,” he says dumbly, but everything is fractured and echoing and weird, but more than that _familiar_ , and he feels disconcertingly like he’s missed something, something important-

//FAST FORWARDING MEMORY TO A MORE RECENT ONE//

Derek is a warm weight near his back, guiding his hand through the motions that he’s been struggling to master.

“And what do you do if you’re cornered?” Derek presses. The quizzing in the middle of intense physical exercise is making him want to spit, but he snarls and rips his hand out of Derek’s patronizing grip and whirls, sinking low with his blade at the ready.

“Fight. Climb. Distract. Run. I know how to get out of a scrape, Derek.”

“Do you?” he says, and even if Derek is visibly unarmed- his weapons by the wayside from where he was attempting to gauge what Stiles might be good with, his Assassin’s robes cast off and his forearms and collarbones distractingly bare- and his hands are outstretched politely, there’s a challenge in Derek’s eyes that has Stiles’ feet tripping backwards.

Running from a wolf is a mistake, though, because Derek surges and never mind the knife in his hand or the swipe he takes with it, Derek twists the blade deftly through his fingers and suddenly it’s out of his grip and in Derek’s. A quick jerk of Derek’s foot behind his heel has him stumbling, a shove at his shoulder has him down, and the blade poises at a slant above his lower ribs. 

“How do you get out of this, hm? And how do you fight when you’re injured? How do you fight while protecting an ally, how do you still accomplish your goal if you’ve been discovered, how do you defend yourself if you’re unarmed and outnumbered and cornered, Stiles, how do you not die?”

His words are fierce and angry, but he drops the hidden blade into the dirt and cages Stiles to the ground with his body, grief in his eyes.

“I’m not going to die, Derek,” he says softly, reaching up to brush a hand through Derek’s hair. The touch seems to break him, and he tips his cheek into Stiles’ hand greedily, eyes closed.

“You are all I have left, do you understand? There is nothing I wouldn’t give to keep you from picking up a blade, to keep you out of this damned war,” Derek murmurs, and he bumps his forehead into Stiles’ cheek with a sharp exhale.

“I need to do this. They tried to kill Scott. I need to know why,” he says, and Derek kisses him warmly on the cheek, trailing up to the corner of his eye until he squeezes it shut.

“I could find out for you, if you’d just promise to stay at the Manor,” he says gruffly, but with resignation, and Stiles huffs a laugh.

“Sure, because one Assassin can cover as much ground as two,” he says, and Derek sits up onto his elbows with a scowl.

“You’re not an Assassin yet, Stiles. Now show me how you’d fend off an attacker on the ground,” he says, and then they’re rolling in the dirt like handsy teenagers.

Stiles’ training goes whip-fast and hard, and then they’re training Scott, too, and suddenly the Manor is full of people with contracts and missions and shared jokes and food and the window panes Derek needs in the bedroom and a gas lamp for the basement and a checkerboard for whiling away the time between hunting and running like mad men through Boston, New York, Lexington. But it’s six whole months until Stiles gets his robes, and Derek seems sad to not be able to have the full ceremony, and then scared to see him go on his first mission.

They don’t often talk about the way the Templars set the Manor ablaze with the whole of the Hale family inside, aside from Derek and his sister, who died before they met. Stiles makes sure his kiss is sweet and reassuring before he leaves, and Derek’s gaze lingers on him the whole way down the trail.

What he finds in New York makes his reappearance two weeks later turns what should be a happy occasion into a nightmare.

Derek meets him at the stables, and he’s weary and heartbroken as he unsaddles his horse.

“What did you find out?” Derek asks, leaning against the stall door. He looks happy that Stiles is back and excited to see what he’s learned. Stiles throws his hood back, scrubbing at his hair as he sighs. He hates to be the bearer of bad news.

“They tried to kill Scott because he’s involved with Allison. Allison’s whole damn family is working with the Templars, but I assume you knew that or else you wouldn’t let her here. And she’s clearly on our side, although she was waffling around the time they tried to take Scott out.”

Here he pauses, being careful as he slips the bridle off his mare’s face. Derek tracks his movements, slowly growing anxious.

“What else?”

“My mother’s death was no accident,” he says, and Derek frowns.

“What? Your mother was run over by a courier, how-”

“And a week before that, she helped two young French children reach the underground station in Beacon Hill,” he snaps, and Derek goes still, eyes flickering over Stiles’ face as recognition slowly comes to him.

“I’m sorry,” he says softly, and he means it more deeply than anyone else ever has. Stiles sighs.

“I don’t blame you, not really. She did what she thought was right with full awareness of the consequences. What I am mad about is Kate Argent.”

Here Derek goes stiff as a board, and shifts so he’s standing straight, feet and shoulders squared. Stiles tenses in kind, staring at him with his reins in hand.

“So there was something. She hinted as much. What happened between the two of you?”

Derek waffles, then pointedly turns and marches out of the stables. Stiles drops his reins into the hay and follows, darting forward to catch up.

“What? It’s not like I’m going to hold it against you. So you slept with Kate Argent. Big deal, it’s not like you loved her or anything.”

Derek stops walking so abruptly that Stiles nearly trips, and the answer is on his face so clearly that Stiles just says, “Oh.”

They’re quiet and still, gauging each other. It’s almost like sizing up an opponent for a fight, only in this fight they both lose either way. 

“So. Okay. You were in love with a Templar. You’re obviously not now, or you wouldn’t- are you? I mean, still?”

“No,” Derek says, hands tightening, “she was- she took everything.”

The words click in, and Stiles is temporarily breathless with understanding. Derek’s hesitation in everything between them, his fierce devotion and the way he clings sometimes, the way he fights-

“Alright. Alright, okay, uh. Is that why you’re fighting-”

“It’s not right. The colonies should be free,” Derek says, almost eager now that they’re hedging around the real issue. Stiles nods, rocking on his heels.

“And did you know she was a Templar when you-”

“Not until later.”

“Did Laura?”

Derek ducks his head, hands in fists.

“She knew something wasn’t- Kate trained me. Or, I took to her training better than I did Laura’s. She noticed, but she didn’t know.”

“Wait, wait,” Stiles says, frowning hard, “so she started training you and then you- had a relationship? Or you had a relationship and then she started training you? Because you said, when we started training, that that was the perfect way to ruin the dynamic of mentor and recruit, that that was the perfect way for you to have too much control over me, or me over you.”

Derek shifts his weight nervously, then sighs long-sufferingly and moves to the porch, where he drags the two chairs there together so they can sit and talk. He carefully faces out towards the harbor as they sit, and he clears his throat awkwardly when he begins.

“When I met her, I thought she was a brawler. There’s a tournament in Boston- that’s where we met. She beat me, and offered to train me. I found out she was a Templar soon after. I didn’t...care, at first. My parents had left the Brotherhood when they left- _Stiles_.”

“What?” he says, and Derek seems to crack for a minute, goes oddly mirror-like and then flickers back into existence.

“I almost joined her,” he says, completely unperturbed by what just happened. “I almost betrayed my sister. For her.”

“I don’t understand,” he says helplessly, and Derek shakes his head.

“She - _wake up, please, Stiles. Just wake up._

_I need you_.”

The world disintegrates.

//FAST FORWARDING MEMORY TO A MORE RECENT ONE//

Kate is nothing compared to Gerard. Where she was all psychological torture to Derek, Gerard is a blunt, unstoppable force.

Stiles doesn’t know why it’s him, why he’s the only one that’s managed to get over the damn fort walls and into the basement of the officer’s house, but he doesn’t really have the mind to question it when Gerard is kicking him around like a dog. He rolls onto all fours and coughs up blood, scrambling across the dirt for where his blade was knocked aside.

“Silly boy,” Gerard says, barely panting, which is practically unbelievable considering how hard he’s been beating him the last few minutes and the fact that he's older than dirt. He aims another kick at Stiles’ head, catching him in the shoulder and flipping him onto his back. He doesn’t even have the energy for sound anymore. It’s pain and breathing and the type of drive that comes from a lack of feeling. He needs to kill Gerard. Gerard is going to burn the Homestead to the ground, kill everyone there, just for the Assassin’s inside.

He won’t let it happen again, so he gropes for his blade again, and is kicked again. Once. Twice. Something gives in his side, and he chokes on the liquid iron in his throat.

“I wonder,” Gerard says, leaning down to grab the front of his robes, “What will Hale’s face look like when he sees your body?”

Stiles lets his head roll back on his neck, gathers a glob of blood in his mouth, and spits it right in Gerard’s face.

“He’ll definitely look better than you,” he says boozily. The room is starting to fracture again, but this time it doesn’t feel like it did, like panic and fear and confusion. This time it feels like peace.

Gerard unfolds a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his face before he looks down at Stiles, like he’s the scum of the Earth, and punches him in the face.

Oh, this game again. Stiles is good at this game. Count the number of blows to the head. One, _bam_ , your vision pulses black. Two, _bam_ , your cheek feels like it’s splitting open. Three, _bam_ -

Oh. That wasn’t inside his head, that was Derek breaking the door down. Gerard drops him in the dirt again, and he coughs weakly, red spilling out of his lips fast now.

“Hale, how nice of you to join us,” Gerard says, but Stiles feels like he shouldn’t be able to understand that, maybe there’s something wrong with the Animus.

Wait. Animus? What the hell is an Animus? Stiles tries to roll over, to cough the blood into the dirt, but he can’t. He’s too weak.

“Genim, it’ll be okay,” Derek says, but his voice sounds fuzzy and far-away, sounds _odd_ , like he’s being translated and the sound is being fed out of his mouth again in his voice, but that’s not what he’s really saying. Stiles feels his eyes grow heavy, and struggles to keep them open.

Derek’s black hair and stubble under the hood breaks, turns the same shiny red as Lydia’s, the planes of his face are now soft and feminine, and he has long enough to think in confusion that oh, of course he would panic now, when there’s some stranger that’s been wearing Emblyn’s face-

Wait. No. Not Emblyn. Emblyn is the one who-

_Oh_.

Stiles breaks out of sleep like fish break the surface of water, and suddenly there’s hands holding him down, gentle but strong, and a flashlight in his eyes and a needle in his arm that burns as it slides out.

“Derek? Jesteś tam? Proszę, gdzie jeste...no, fucking, ugh, Derek!”

“Stiles? It’s alright. Hold still, Deaton has to check you out, make sure the bleeding effect is gone.”

Stiles lays back against the squishy chair and lets Deaton ask him questions, answers them with a profound sensation of being winded. Not Derek. Emblyn. Emblyn de Gevaudan, head of the Assassin’s Brotherhood in America. From the year 1772 to 1796.

“Motherfucker,” he says softly to himself, and Deaton smiles grimly at him.

“How long was I under?” he asks, trying to remember the last thing he was doing. He can’t, but he remembers- there’s some sort of apocalypse bullshit going on. He has some kind of role in it, he was supposed to be doing- something.

“Something like thirteen hours,” Lydia answers tightly from his elbow, and he twists to look up at her.

“Huh. Okay. Uh, so I assume Derek was trying to bust me out, but how did he sync up to my head, my memories, if I wasn’t plugged in? I saw- there was that space between sync, where everything is all fracture-y. I saw that space. How did I see that if I wasn’t plugged in?”

Lydia and Danny share a look, and Danny shrugs. She sighs and turns back to him, rolling her eyes.

“Danny guessed that if we plugged Derek into a shared memory, you’d sense his presence and sort of- “ she makes some garbled hand motion, then flicks her hands out and frowns. “Either way, it worked. Which is the point. And now I’m giving you a compound that should stop the bleeding effect.”

He holds still as she slips the needle into his arm, and as she draws it back out, she says, “Oh, but it’ll also stop you from using the Animus.”

“Lydia, what the hell?” he says, yanking his arm away, but it's too late. Scott places a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugs it off and sits up.

“You guys need me! My ancestors have memories that yours don’t, none of us knew anything about the Assassin’s movement in Poland and the Assassin's emigration to America-”

“And now we know enough,” Scott says, the dark and commanding tone to his voice that says enough is enough. When Stiles looks up, Scott’s staring him down. Stiles sighs, but he knows that they’re right.

“Alright. So I’m on intel gathering, right?”

“For now,” Derek says, and then he’s shouldering up next to Scott and he’s so much better, clearer, more _real_ than he was in the Animus, or wherever the hell he was, “you’re on R &R. And so am I.”

Suddenly he notes the tension in Derek’s eyes, the way he’s holding himself so stiffly, the same way he does when he’s covering a wound. He stands.

“Were you- tell me you weren’t in there the whole thirteen hours, dude. That’s a long ass time to be under,” he says, and Derek shrugs.

“It doesn’t matter. I got you out. It had to be done.”

“At the risk of ruining your own mind?” he snaps, and suddenly there’s a weird way that Derek’s muscles loosens, and he closes his eyes for a second. 

“Yes. Can we have this conversation in private?” he says, and Stiles is suddenly really aware that everyone’s staring.

“Yeah, of course, yeah, woops,” he says, and lets Derek lead him down the shitty hallway to where they’ve got bunk beds set up, covers thrown around haphazardly and books everywhere. He likes this, misses it in a way that wasn’t visceral until now. The bedroom where they fuck off and watch movies on down time, where Allison and Scott cuddle under her atrocious pink comforter while everyone tries not to either gag or fawn, where Lydia makes Jackson sit up with her as she tries to teach him history from her database articles and her collection of books that she insists on dragging along with her when they have to move.

Derek sits on his bunk, shoulders weary and hunched, and looks up at him with those green-light eyes that he saw in the Animus, or really the space inside of his head, and recognized.

“I didn’t see her, you know,” he says, wincing at the way it just blurts out of his mouth, “my brain or whatever, it recoded Emblyn so that she looked like you. I called her your name, she had your face, your- your scars.”

He shouldn’t have seen those scars, except for the times in the shower that he wasn’t supposed to look, because they might be in the same Brotherhood but they’re not exactly friends, definitely not the lovers he thought they were inside those memories.

“You do realize that since we have shared memories, that means we’re distantly related, right?” Derek asks, and Stiles waves a hand, frowning.

“Oh, whatever. We’re all distantly related somehow. And it was long enough ago that it’s not incestuous, god.”

He doesn’t realize exactly what he’s said until he’s said it, and then Derek just grins smugly up at him.

“Shut up, I didn’t mean it-”

“Didn’t you? You could hear me, Stiles, even though you weren’t plugged in.”

“It was the shared memories,” he says quickly, and Derek shakes his head, and then suddenly he’s holding out his hand.

“Come here,” he says when Stiles doesn’t move, and Stiles moves forward slowly until he can grab him by the hip and reel him in closer, to stand in the v of Derek’s legs and be looked at closely.

“I didn’t see your face,” Derek says slowly, “but I wish I had.” 

His hand ghosts up Stiles’ side, to where there was blood what seems just a few minutes ago.

“I’m glad it wasn’t your face when you died, though,” he says, and his face is conflicted, like he thinks he shouldn’t be upset about watching Stiles die.

Stiles misses him so much in that moment that he leans down and kisses him. There is no way his dumbass ancestor got to have this and he won’t. There is no way he’s not going to take this right now if he can. Carpe motherfucking diem, as he’s been saying since day one.

When the desperation fades, he realizes how tired he is and how much effort it’s taking to stay bent over Derek like this, and the kiss turns hazy and relaxed until Derek leans back a little, still holding his hip as he falls back on the bed. 

Stiles crawls into bed with him and remembers how Genim and Emblyn did it, how she tucked up to his stomach and would warm her hands under his thigh. That’s how Derek settles instinctively, his hands just as broad as Stiles thought they’d be.

They fall asleep, and for once they don’t wake on a hair’s trigger.

**Author's Note:**

> This was mostly born out of a need to see Derek dressed up as Connor, because MMM. And they both have that "strong and supposedly silent but actually really smart and sassy" thing going on, so it was a nice thought. Basically Derek is head of their very small Brotherhood, Scott is Desmond, Allison is Lucy (I think? I haven't seen her whole story, all I know is Desmond kills her or something), Danny is Rebecca, Stiles is an assassin they recruited because of his Polish heritage, Jackson is communications/transport, and Lydia is Shaun. I mean, LYDIA IS SHAUN. CAN YOU PICTURE THE GODDAMN DATABASE ARTICLES, TOO MUCH SASS TO EVEN COMPUTE. AND IF YOU DON'T READ THEM SHE STABS YOU WITH A METAL NAIL FILE IN THE FOOT WHILE YOU SLEEP AND HISSES "NEXT TIME YOU'LL READ UP ON NOTRE DAME AFTER I MADE IT SO SHORT AND SWEET AND LEFT OUT EVERYTHING ABOUT THE DEVELOPMENT OF GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE WONT YOU MOTHERFUCKER"
> 
> I know the ancestors are kind of confusing, which I wouldn't normally like to leave so open-ended in a fic, but it just felt right this time. Anyways, my thinking is that Emblyn (which is a French name that means "king or ruler", just like Derek does) and her family emigrated to America shortly after the whole Beast of Gevaudon thing, which would be Peter's direct ancestor, and her parents set up the new Brotherhood shortly before the Argents followed them over and killed them all. Genim (for whom Stiles was named) came over to America with his mother from Poland and she was killed shortly after. Emblyn recruited Genim and together they fought to take down the Order of the Templars with their gathering of recruits, until Genim was killed a short six years after they met by Gerard Argent. The reason the names are the same throughout most of the fic is that Stiles, while under the influence of the bleeding effect, mixed the people he knew and the languages he knew with his DNA memories, which to him made it indistinguishable from real life. 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed, and if you have a question or a critique, please leave a comment below!


End file.
